The US Air Force has made an appeal for a range of new technologies which it will need in building its planned new arsenal of aerial rayguns. In particular, it wants large artificial optically-correct diamonds for use as portholes through which to shoot electropulse microwave blaster cannons.
Under its "Directed Energy [Weapon …

transparent aluminum?

Maybe they could talk to they Austrian blokes and see if their basalt-fibre whatsits can do the trick?

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/22/edag_light_car_geneva/

"...while similar in usage to carbon fibre and fibreglass, it's tougher than the latter and cheaper than the former. It is also fully recyclable and has a specific tenacity three times that of steel. At least that's what is says here.

The basalt-fibre body panels will apparently be transparent giving the car the appearance of being made of glass..."

Sharks or Jets?

What's with the sharks with lasers obsession?

Just an observation, but sharks scare people, and they tend to move away from them very quickly!! Why not mount the lasers on dolphins instead, they'd have a much better chance of getting close up before blasting bad guys (and girls) right between the eyes! :-D

OOPPSS

business as usual

You'd think that with the massive economic problems currently facing the US, the powers-at-be would call a halt to R&D of such exotic weaponry. As Rep. Ron Paul said this week "...the problem is nobody wants to cut the American Empire, even Obama's Administration wants to increase spending overseas and increase military spending. As long as you want to run the World Empire... you cannot solve this problem."

@John

Sharks

90Watts/Lb is roughyl 200 Watts/Kg (Translating from the merkin) a large shark is good for tackling man sized prey so capable of wielding a good 100Kg's say half that since the shark has to lug it around all day so, looks like the shark will only put out 10KW.

Probably is enough for the shorter ranges one would expect a shark to operate at.